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SQL Server Reporting Services : Benefits of a 3rd Party Scheduler

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Reports has a scheduling system that can manage and distribute your report subscriptions. Does it do the job? Do SSRS’ internal features satisfy all of the business’ needs? In some cases, firms look to 3rd party solutions to complete their projects. Some solutions enable a greater flexibility in subscription publication, or offer a wider array of scheduling options, while others help manage SSRS Reports. Most importantly, using a 3rd party solution such as SQL-RD can provide a much higher ROI for initial, ongoing and future costs.

Data Driven scheduling in SSRS

Event Triggered SSRS report delivery

Additional "quirky" business demands

Data Driven Scheduling

In many scenarios, businesses need a highly flexible scheduling system to augment their existing SSRS reporting environment. For example, a firm must distribute a report of their current inventory and price list to each of its vendors each day. Different vendor systems must accept these price lists in different ways; vendor 1 must have a CSV file uploaded via FTP, while another accepts the price list by email. With tools such as SQL-RD, SSRS Data Driven subscriptions can be customized so that each unique report subscription goes to a unique destination and format. Multiple SSRS reports can also be distributed in batches.

Event Triggered Delivery

In some cases, SSRS reports must deliver based on events or conditions. 3rd party tools can trigger your reports based on conditions such as changes in a database, the existence or modification of specific files, or even unread emails. This type of scheduling can build a real-time alert system with the ability to interface with databases and systems outside of SQL Server reporting services. Event based scheduling is a standard feature of SQL-RD.

PDF Encryption, Zipped Reports & More

Lastly, external SQL Server tools can help manage the SSRS Reports system. If there are multiple SSRS reporting environments within the same organization, why not manage them from a single interface? With these tools, multiple reports from various SSRS reporting environments can be exported to multiple SharePoint sites easily. More importantly, what if you wanted to add extra layers of security to your report outputs? SQL-RD could be used to automatically encrypt PDF, excel, and zipped reports.

SSRS and SQL Server are powerful systems that are perfect for reporting and data warehousing. Even still, there are places where SSRS doesn’t satisfy every single business case. Combining SSRS with a dedicated scheduling tool creates a total business intelligence solution for any scenario.

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About ChristianSteven

With over 1,000 clients in 47 countries, we are committed to a culture where we put people first – our customers, our employees & our partners. We specialize in reporting, report distribution, report scheduling, dashboards & automating business processes for Power BI, SSRS, Crystal Reports & MS Access.